1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer network implemented gaming systems, and more particularly to a system and method for network implemented remote audio and image transmission of real time casino gaming events to enable remote participation therein.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The international nature of computer networks, sometime referred to as the World Wide Web or Internet, has rendered any attempts at complete prohibition of online gambling virtually ineffective. As result all sorts regulatory schemes pockmark the landscape which rather than outright prohibition funnel the online gambling activity into a desired set of privileges and exceptions. For example, the National Indian Gaming Commission has recently ruled that the Indian Gaming regulatory Act, by the simple expedient of a xe2x80x98proxyxe2x80x99 betting mechanism at the end of a phone line, exempts off-reservation remote gambling from the strictures of the Wire Act of 1961. Concurrently, several Federal Court rulings have held that the Wire Act does not apply to those activities that assist gaming communication to a state where it is lawful and the recently proposed Internet Gambling Prohibition Act keeps repeatedly dying many deaths in committee. Those attempts at prohibition that still persist, mainly at the state level, are colored by self-interest, as best exemplified by the online gambling prohibitions enacted in Nevada.
These manifestations of self-interest have not done well in the international setting, particularly amongst those countries whose citizenry has reached the wisdom and maturity to inspect, reject and strip off all pretextual patinas of morality that sometimes cover greed or self-interest. For example, the United Kingdom is now enacting statutory schemes which regulate, but do not prohibit, online gambling and the physical dictates of self-interest will compel similar responses from others if large scale monetary consequences are to be prevented. The dam has broken and online gambling is not just as an isolated privilege but a fact of life.
Consistent with these developments various network implemented gaming systems have been devised, exemplified by the teachings of U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,333,868 to Goldfarb, 5,351,970 to Fioretti and others. While suitable for the purposes intended each of the foregoing implement a computer program generated wholly virtual gaming system with the game, its images and sequences synthetically created and random number generated. Like all computer programs these can be easily replicated and have been even modified on occasion into various fraudulent bilking mechanisms. The same difficulties that have rendered prohibition virtually impossible are also in effect here and the population of such fraudulent sites will only increase as online gambling enters the mainstream. Notably, in the business of gambling even small levels of fraud are unwanted as the notion of cheating at cards or other games of chance is a venerable and familiar one. The reputation of a casino has therefore served for a long time as the underpinning for customer reliance and the brick-and-mortar facility remains the centerpiece for any effective marketing of gaming. These reasons limit the usefulness of program generated, wholly synthetic gaming events even if associated with some symbol of a real casino.
While trademark and trade dress policing may have had some effect, there exists nonetheless a persistent population of unscrupulous web site providers which boldly mimic or suggest association with an established casino to perpetrate fraud using doctored gaming programs. Verification by the potential patron is therefore a necessary ingredient of the process and one reliable verification of a gaming web site is the ability to browse through and inspect, at will, the several gambling venues of the real brick and mortar casino that is associated with the site. Such inspection cannot just entail some group of still pictures but should depict live and unrehearsed gambling in order to instill the confidence that the image is not merely a staged event and the selection of the accessible gambling venues should be both extensive and wholly within the viewers choice. Of course, these same features will expose the remote viewer to the compelling venues where the excitement of the local participants itself provides the inducement to join the game. In this manner the same process that instills verifiable association with a casino is also useful to attract those making the remote inspection into the game.
In the past various techniques have been devised which in one way or another provide a remote video display of a gaming event. For example U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,802 to Pocock describes a televised bingo game, U.S. Pat. No. 5,324,035 to Morris et al describes a video gaming system with various betting pools, and so on. These each rely on conventional transmission of a video signal which currently exceeds the bandwidth of a computer network. In the main computer networks have been associated as an adjunct to video signals, as for example program selection guides, such as those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,532,754; 5,479,266; 5,479,268; and others all assigned to Starsight Telecast, Inc. of Fremont, Calif., or those assisting the operation of video cassette recorders like that taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,151,789, also assigned to the same assignee. The use of a computer network as both the selection tool and also as a full fidelity video image signal carrier has not had much attention in the prior art, primarily because of the limited data rate, or bandwidth, and propagation delays inherent in any distributed network.
Those in the art will appreciate that the physical scaling laws of a human have dictated the response frequency of our visual processing system. Thus there is a minimum frame rate that must be exceeded in order to avoid the perception of flicker. More importantly, the scenes that convey most of the exciting events are group scenes, fill of very fine detail and therefore not susceptible to most current compression techniques as these rely on reductions of the field of view and/or reduction of detail. Nor do these group scenes lend themselves to effective compression along the time vector (change from a base frame), pattern recognition compression like interpolation (MPEG), spectral analysis based compression like JPEG and others. In the main these prior art interpolation techniques rely on a common scheme or focus in the frame image to base the deviations therefrom as the mechanism for data reduction. The scenes conveying players"" excitement lack this central theme and are therefore difficult to compress to any degree while the minimum frame rate that avoids flicker has been earlier determined by scaling laws to be an immutable physical limit.
The same mechanisms of evolution that have observed the laws of physics like energy conservation have also evolved a human sensorium that emphasizes changes in the matter sensed and defers to boredom the steady state. Simply, in the large scale this is the better compression technique which is synergistically combined with the inherent propagation delays of a distributed computer network to accommodate the verification and entertainment aspects of a plurality of remotely viewed casino venues and it is such combination that is disclosed herein.
Accordingly, it is the general purpose and object of the present invention to provide a computer network video image transmission process in which the frequency of the sensed image frames is varied according to the change in audio level in the area that is imaged.
Other objects of the invention are to provide a computer network enabled video image transmission process in which selected video image sequences are serially transmitted on the network with their reception display delayed to accommodate the bandwidth limitations of the network.
Further objects of the invention are to provide a video image transmission system in which the video images are transformed to a transmission time interval that is greater than the original video image frame rate to thereby conform with the data transmission rates of a computer network and thereafter reconstructed to the original frame rate at the receiving terminal delayed by the cumulative time differential between the transformed transmission and the original frame rate.
Briefly, these and other objects are accomplished within the present invention by providing a plurality of monitors throughout a casino each conformed to sense and record the optical scene before it together with the associated audio signals. The high data content video signal is then split from the audio signal and the separated audio component is compared for total sound energy changes by a shaped analyzer which may take the form of a spectrum analyzer with the square of the weighted spectral components summed into a single output and then differentiated to detect audio energy changes. A comparator or detector is then utilized to sense the change in audio level above a predetermined threshold that is normally associated with a participants"" reaction to some surprising event like an extremely favorable draw of playing cards, a surprising coincidence at the roulette wheel or some other unusual gaming development. In the course of this discrimination these various spectra of the audio signal are shaped by the weighting coefficient in order to emphasize the higher components usually associated with excitement from ordinary changes in audio intensity.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that any human response will include the usual delays that are part of a reaction and there is therefore a predictable delay that may range between 1 and 3 seconds between the surprising event and the participants"" response thereto. To accommodate this delay both the video and audio signals are delayed each by a fixed, equal interval obtained by any conventional means such as a delay line or buffer, depending on the type of implementation When the audio level change indicates an unusual gaming event then a higher video frame rate is commenced in the undelayed video signal passed into the network at the network bandpass rate limit with selected video frames being marked for synchronization to the audio signal. At the subscribing receiver console these higher density video frames are reassembled and the audio signal further delayed and synchronized with the reconstructed video signal by the markers earlier applied thereto. In this manner a substantially higher video frame rate is passed by the conventional network with the delays associated therewith being within the customary propagation delay intervals of a distributed network. The gaming events of particular interest are therefore reconstructed at the remote site to a much higher fidelity.
The foregoing system may be further enhanced to function simultaneously with a conventional electronic game process in which the cards may be electronically read, as by way of bar code for example or the thrown dice combination is keyed in by the dealer. In the case of craps, for example, the live players play as they would at any other craps table. However, as the live bets are being wagered and executed, an unlimited number of virtual participants are also wagering on the game; feeding upon the same energy created in the live environment. The remote player is able to watch the shooter and all the live players; see the dice as they fall and be swept up in the betting frenzy that so often grows out of a xe2x80x9chotxe2x80x9d table. Of course, the necessary delays of the foregoing process as well as the customary network propagation delays will require an earlier betting cut-off for the remote players. In this manner a system and process are devised which communicate over the existing narrow bandwidth computer network the exciting portions of any game venue in a casino that is selected randomly by the remote viewer, thereby conveying both the live excitement and the assurance that the images are from a real, well known enterprise.
It will be appreciated that most data compression techniques rely on prediction to a large extent in the selection of the data that is to be compressed or omitted. The recognition of a pattern is therefore at the core of compression. This, however, contradicts the spontaneous nature of human excitement and thus the assurance aspects of an event perceived to be real and unrehearsed. Thus the usual compression techniques obscure rather than emphasize the images associated with gaming. Simply, the predictive and pattern determined processes of data compression are in apposite in a system that emphasizes spontaneity and surprise.